"You are not boring me," I said.
"Then there was the girl: that had been arranged for both of us, too, though we were carefully kept from suspecting it. I can't tell you what she was to me, Jimmie, but in a worldful of women she was the only one. She was in college, too, but we had our vacations together—at a little place on the Maine coast where her people and mine had cottages less than a stone's throw apart."
Barrett's cigar had gone out, but he seemed not to know it. His eyes were half-closed, and for the moment his strong clean-cut young face looked almost haggard. I let him take his own time. In such confidences it is only the sympathetic ear that is welcome; speech in any sort can scarcely be less than impertinent.
"I shall never forget our last summer together," he went on, after a bit. "It seemed as if everything conspired to make it memorable. We were both fond of canoeing and sailing and swimming; she could do all three better than most men. Then there were the moonlit nights on the beach when we sat together on the white sands and planned for the future, the future of clear skies, of ambitions working out their fulfilment in the passing years, the blessed after-while in which there were to be an ideal home and little children, and always and evermore the love that makes all things beautiful, all things possible.
"We planned it all out in those August days and moonlit nights. I had one more year in the university, and after that we were to be married and go to Europe together. No young fellow in this world ever had brighter prospects than I had on the day when I went back to college to begin my senior year, Jimmie." He paused for a moment and then went on with a deeper note in his voice. "The lights all went out, blink, between two days, as you might say. The treasurer of the company of which my father was the president became an embezzler, and the crash ruined us financially and practically killed my father—though the doctors called it heart failure. And I had been at home less than a month, trying to save something out of the wreck for my mother and sister, when I lost the girl."
"She couldn't stand the change in circumstances?" I offered.
"She was drowned in a yachting accident, and they never found her body."
"Oh, good heavens!" I exclaimed, suddenly and acutely distressed and remorseful for the cynical suggestion I had thrust in.
He shook his head slowly. "It came near smashing me, Jimmie. It seemed so unnecessary; so hideously out of tune with everything. I thought at the time that I should never get over it and be myself again, and I still think so, though the passing years have dulled the sharp edges of the hurt. There never was another girl like her, and there never will be another—for me."
"But you will marry, some day, Bob," I ventured.